News

A new concentration in nanotechnology will provide undergraduate students with foundational knowledge of the manipulation of matter on the molecular and atomic scale and position them for future careers in the nanotechnology field. The new concentration will give College of Engineering undergraduates access to a growing, far-reaching field that is expanding into virtually all areas of engineering.

Beginning this fall, students graduating in January 2011 and beyond can add a concentration in nanotechnology to any existing engineering bachelor’s degree program. The concentration will be formally noted on their official transcripts.

“Similar to the Energy Technologies and Environmental concentration announced recently, the Nanotechnology concentration allows any undergraduate to add a rapidly emerging engineering discipline to a foundational degree in a core discipline,” said Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen. “This allows students to position themselves for a career in nanotechnology while they graduate with a degree in an established engineering discipline.”

Careful selection of electives can allow students to satisfy the concentration’s requirements without additional courses. In addition to the 16-credit coursework, the concentration concludes with successful completion of a well-defined experiential component that can include a senior design project, industrial placement or laboratory research with a faculty member.

Selim Ünlü

“The new nanotechnology concentration is a reflection of the dedication and excitement of the faculty,” said ECE Professor Selim Ünlü. “The College of Engineering has made a significant investment in faculty and resources in the nanotechnology area over the last several years and will draw strength from the low barriers between the Engineering departments, science departments throughout Boston University, and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanobiotechnology.”

Students will focus on the emergence of nanotechnology and its effects on biomedical, photonic, electronic and atomic systems.

The required courses will provide an introduction to nanotechnology, and examine how engineering works on scales as small as millionths of a millimeter. Students will explore the foundations of quantum mechanics, atomic structure and the physics of molecules and solids.

The multi-disciplinary elective courses will include different approaches to biomedical engineering on the cellular and sub-cellular level; behavior of materials at atomic levels; micro-electrical mechanical devices and systems; and photonics and fiber-optic communication. As nanotechnology expands in all fields of engineering, students entering the work force with a strong knowledge base position themselves to be future leaders the nanotechnology industry.

Prof. Ari Trachtenberg

ECE Associate Professor Ari Trachtenberg was named as one of two inaugural recipients of an Innovative Engineering Education Faculty (IEEF) Fellowship. Professor Trachtenberg, along with Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Don Wroblewski,  was recommended for selection by the IEEF Review Committee to the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Kenneth Lutchen.

Dean Lutchen wrote, “The selection honors these individuals as innovative educators in engineering and in providing the resources to further enhance engineering education here at Boston University in a sustainable way.”

Professor Trachtenberg is a member of ECE’s Information Systems and Sciences group with his “Networking and Information Systems” lab. He is the 2003 recipient of the ECE Excellence in Teaching Award. His research interests are in error correcting codes, security, data synchronization (especially PDAs and mobile networks), sensor-based location detection, and algorithms. His current research with Associate Professor David Starobinski entitled “A theory of monitoring based on identifying codes and their variants” is funded by the NSF and his research topic “Secure and Efficient Data Distribution in Varying-Topology Networks” is funded by Deutsche Telekom.

His innovative engineering education project is entitled “Engineering Evangelism.” Professor Trachtenberg intends to introduce two methods into the engineering curriculum. The first method identified as “Tangible Expressions” capitalizes on the fact the engineers relate well to concrete and tangible projects. While a good part of the student’s first years involve acquiring theoretical tools needed, Prof. Trachtenberg will provide palpable real-world manipulatives that can be presented alongside the theory. The second method “Novel Devices”, plans to expand the fundamentals of computer engineering from computers and associated devices to a wider variety of commonly used devices, such as Microsoft’s Xbox or smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system or the iPhone. This method will provide a rich set of applications that can inspire and excite students with tangible applications of their learning.

Prof. Roberto Paiella

ECE Professor Roberto Paiella was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and awarded full tenure status by Boston University’s Board of Trustees.

President Brown congratulated Prof. Paiella, writing, “In granting you promotion and tenure, the Trustees have recognized your contributions to the academic excellence of Boston University. I am grateful for those contributions, and I hope your association with the University remains personally and professionally rewarding.”

Prof. Paiella, who received his PhD from California Institute of Technology in 1998, is an IEEE senior member. In 2008, he won the BU Office of Technology Development Ignition Award. This year, he was awarded a BU College of Engineering Dean’s Catalyst award. His research interests include optical technologies for information processing; photonic devices based on semiconductor quantum structures, including group-III nitride quantum wells; nanoscale photonic devices and circuits; and ultrafast optics.

Prof. Luca Dal Negro

ECE Professor Luca Dal Negro received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in support of his project Combined Light and Carrier Localization in High-refractive Index Silicon Nanocrystal Structures: a Novel Approach for Si-based Lasers. The grant is awarded to junior university faculty “who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.” Professor Dal Negro is the 14th ECE faculty member to receive this award.

Project Summary:

This Faculty Early Career Development project aims to advance nanophotonics by developing a new class of light emitting devices exploiting aperiodic media.

Intellectual Merit:
This Faculty Early Career Development project aims to advance nanophotonics by developing a new class of light emitting devices that leverage Anderson light localization in deterministic aperiodic media for enhancing radiative transitions in silicon nanostructures. Differently from conventional photonic crystals approaches, the proposed research allows broadband engineering of density of states fluctuations, radiation patterns and localized fields in photonic-plasmonic nanostructures, enabling unprecedented control and enhancement of radiative processes on the nanoscale. The active material will consist of Er ions embedded in Si nitride superlattice structures. This material provides efficient excitation of Er resulting in 1.54ìm emission, which will couple with localized modes in aperiodic metal-dielectric arrays. This project explores for first time Anderson light localization in the context of on-chip light emission, and will result in the demonstration of photonic-plasmonic light-emitters susceptible of optical and electrical excitation.

Broader impact:
The successful demonstration of Si-based emitters and lasers will extend the reach of optical technologies into diverse fields, enabling low-cost applications of integrated optics in communication, processing, interconnects and optical biosensing. The establishment of this program at Boston University will contribute to a substantial education and outreach plan with the development of new courses for graduate (Nanophotonics) and undergraduate students (Science of Light), international symposia and short courses on Nanophotonics open to the general public and freely accessible online. These initiatives, combined with the largely interdisciplinary character of the proposed effort, will attract many young scientists to the exploding new fields of nanophotonics, plasmonics and light-localization in complex media.

A day-long seminar hosted by Boston University addressed complicated questions in energy management on May 21.

“Disrupting the Status Quo in Electric Energy Management: A Systems Approach to a Sustainable Energy Future,” brought 168 guests from industry, venture capital and academia to the Photonics Center to hear from leaders in energy management. Lecture topics included future energy systems, building infrastructure and a panel discussion on widespread adoption of new energy management strategies.

“Sustainable energy is among the most critical problems society faces today,” said Associate Provost and Vice President for Research Andrei Ruckenstein in his opening remarks. “It may also be among our most complicated problems.”

The morning lectures and discussion focused on transforming the electric power system into a smart grid – an electricity delivery system that would incorporate technology to maximize energy and monetary savings while also increasing reliability of power delivery.

Professor Michael Caramanis, who works on combining wind-generated power with the use of electric cars, said the electric power system is the largest machine that humans have made, making it one of the most complex to overhaul.

Those responsible for modernizing the US energy grid must understand both the engineering and the economics of the finely nuanced challenge, said William Hogan, the Raymond Plank professor of global energy policy at Harvard University. To make a smart grid will require both complex technology advances and finely tuned policy changes. The smart grid must incorporate advanced sensors and automation as well as nuanced strategies for pricing electricity in real time.

“If we knew what to do today, we should do it – get out our crayons and map of the US and draw the super grid,” said Hogan. “But the uncertainty of conditions requires innovation – promoting practices not yet identified or even imagined.”

Speakers from PJM, an electricity transmission company that manages much of the eastern US, and the Boston-based energy management company EnerNOC, described their companies’ forays into smart management of energy loads. Institutions such as hospitals and universities sign up with these companies for incentive programs. The institutions get paid and then occasionally get called upon to quickly cut down electricity usage when demands are high in their region.

This type of “demand response” program by companies that stand between the utility and the consumer may become a more widespread strategy for the relatively few days that demands peak, but that utilities must be prepared for at any time.

“Most energy management these days happens by looking in the rear view mirror,” said EnerNOC President David Brewster, whose company manages 3,000 megawatts of energy at 5,000 sites. “You can create a system that’s much more efficient. We’re spending billions of dollars to build infrastructure that sits idle 90 percent of the time.”

In the US, this approach has not reached the level of individual houses, a market where the addition of some in-home automation and customer awareness of fluctuating prices could make a meaningful impact on the country’s energy use, the speakers noted.

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering professors Christos Cassandras and Tom Little spoke about energy innovations coming from their labs. Cassandras works on sensor networks, control systems and algorithms that could become powerful tools in developing smart ways to save energy. Little described his work as a member of a National Science Foundation SmartLighting Engineering Research Center, investigating the use of energy-efficient LED lights as a communication network.

“LEDs are low cost, highly controllable and adaptable lights that can be used in a wide variety of applications,” Little said. Twenty-two percent of the world’s energy use goes to lighting, he added. “There are tremendous opportunities to save energy around the world.”

College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen spoke about the role of engineering education in addressing the complex and highly interdisciplinary challenges in the energy field, citing flexibility and agility as the keys to training engineers for leadership roles.

“The leaders of the future have to understand that the problem is not just about technologies, not just about policies and politics, not just about sustainability,” Lutchen said, “It’s about all of those.”

The day concluded with a panel discussion in which energy industry executives, moderated by Rob Day, president of the Renewable Energy Business Network, considered widespread adoption of new electric energy management strategies.

The event was hosted by BU’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering, College of Arts and Sciences, Division of Systems Engineering, School of Management and Sensor Network Consortium.

For more information on the day’s events and to view speakers’ slide kits, visit the seminar website.

Prof. Mark Horenstein

Solar power has been getting a lot of press recently as a key part of the “green technology” solution to the nation’s energy problems, but less is said about a fundamental limitation of the technology that two BU engineering researchers are working to overcome. Although photovoltaic solar energy has been around for decades, its use is limited, partly because glass-covered solar panels tend to accumulate dust, which reduces the amount of light reaching the silicon cells underneath.

Funded in part by a new award from Boston University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD), a project conducted by Research Professor Malay Mazumder and Professor Mark Horenstein, both of ECE, aims to address this limitation and make solar energy more cost effective and energy efficient.

Prof. Malay Mazumder

Mazumder and Horenstein recently won an OTD Ignition Award, which is given to faculty and staff to bridge the gap between government funded research and product development work. The ECE duo is using the $50,000 award to continue development of a cost-effective way to clean solar panels without the use of water.

“When we think of ‘solar energy’ today, we tend to envision one or two solar panels placed on someone’s garage here in New England,” Mazumder said. “But in reality, the long term trend is toward the development of very large solar installations where sunlight is strong and plentiful, like the desert.

“But the unavoidable buildup of dust on solar panels in desert installations decrease their energy-conversion efficiency, and the absence of water precludes washing the panels to clean them.”

The research is a spin-off of a previous NASA-funded project pioneered by Mazumder at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, prior to joining Boston University in 2007. The project developed technology that cleaned dust from panels of exploration vehicles on dry and dusty Mars.

“One factor that limited the lifetime of the recent Pathfinder missions to Mars was the slow reduction in available solar power caused by dust deposition on the panels,” Mazumder said.

Existing cleaning methods for solar panels are akin to window washers, which are expensive and need water to operate. Horenstein and Mazumder will use lateral waves of electrostatic force to clear dust from the glass surfaces that cover solar panels. A sensor embedded in the panel will detect reduction in solar output and initiate the clearing process to remove the dust.

“The cleaning operation itself will only take about 10 seconds or so, and need be run only every few minutes or hours,” Horenstein said. “It would be like turning on windshield wipers during a light drizzle – it need be done only every so often.”

While the technology to be adapted in Horenstein and Mazumder’s lab has been shown to work, one large obstacle remaining is the development of an inexpensive manufacturing process. While current economic limitations exist, Mazumder believes the government-mandated tax breaks and an infusion of research grants in green technology will make solar energy a huge part of the economy, and a clean energy solution, going forward.

“Global demand for solar energy harvesting is huge,” he said. “The new government is gung ho on these projects, but the manufacturing process is still critical. We need to understand how we can get this done in a less expensive manner.”

On May 4 at ECE Day 2009, the ECE Department faculty and staff, visitors from industry, alumni, and others from the Boston University community were treated to 14 truly impressive Senior Design and Senior Honors Theses presentations. Among the presenting groups, three were honored as stand-outs by the ECE Senior Design Project awards committee:

Phoney Money

Winner: PT Hsu Award (outstanding senior design project) and Best Presentation
Team Members: Kevin Allgaier, Brianna Carges, Amy Costandi, Barry Lai, Jeffrey Li

The Phoney Money team developed an iPhone application and point-of-sale acceptance system that enables iPhone users to securely pay for purchases using their phone as a credit card.

A video demonstration of the system is available on our YouTube page.
You can also see a video of the group’s ECE Day presentation.

Macrosoft

Winner: Best Presentation
Team members: Abin Ajayakumar, Moses Chen, Nael Musleh, Christopher Ogorzalek, Patrick Raspante

The Macrosoft team developed a mass-transit arrival monitoring system for the MBTA called “T-Nav.” The system uses GPS, cell phones, and a central server to give users accurate train arrival predictions.

A video demonstration of the system is available on our YouTube page.
You can also see a video of the group’s ECE Day presentation.

The 5 Moniteers

Winner: Best Presentation
Team members: Christopher Arensdorf, Matthew Carey, Shawn Fitzpatrick, Michael Tirgardoon, Andrew Velasco

The 5 Moniteers team designed a personal monitoring system to measure and interpret posture and movement. Applications for the system range from monitoring the mobility patterns of elderly patients to analyzing the movement habits of athletes for sports performance enhancement.

A video demonstration of the system is available on our YouTube page.
You can also see a video of the group’s ECE Day presentation.

Teams consisting of ECE students and professors won first and second place at the 2008-2009 Boston University College of Engineering Entrepreneur Design Contest (EDC).

The EDC, which is open to teams throughout the College of Engineering, was initially founded on the idea that young scientists and engineers, who work on cutting edge research, come across business opportunities before anyone else does.

In addition to a cash prize, the winners are entitled to a full and expedited review by Boston University’s New Ventures Division at the Office of Technology Development and 20 hours of legal consulting from Foley and Lardner.

This year’s winners:

1st place

VCon
Team members: Ajay Bangla, Stephen Chao, Prakash Ishwar, Janusz Konrad

In the last decade, the security industry has seen huge improvements in its ability to amass surveillance information. But despite huge increases in security spending, there has been little to no reduction of fraud, theft, crime, and terror. Part of the reason is that even as surveillance systems have become more advanced, we human beings haven’t gotten any faster at watching or reviewing all that video, understanding its contents, and finding critical information. This “Security Gap” between what we collect and what we can analyze is at the root of the most pressing problems in surveillance today. VCon Technologies will provide state-of-the-algorithms to help close this gap between information gathered and that analyzed.

2nd place

Route Optimization System
Ashish Agarwal, Matt Wool, Lonn Drucker, Thomas Little, and Iain Cockburn

Route Optimization System will deliver a hardware and software technology innovation that significantly reduces the time wasted while stuck in traffic thereby increasing vehicle utility, driver productivity and business efficiency. Our vision is to cut-down the delay in real-time traffic updates and deliver intelligence to customers that lack the scale, know-how, or resources to enable smart transportation independently. An important part of the company vision is to concurrently help customers reduce their impact on the environment. As eliminating waste and lowering unintelligent use of transportation resources will reduce carbon emissions, our company gives its customers the tool to reach this goal.

Prof. Hatice Altug

ECE Assistant Professor Hatice Altug was recently named as the recipient of a Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) Matching Grant. These grants are designed to fund research at higher-education and affiliated research institutions in Massachusetts and foster and grow the scientific research enterprise of the Commonwealth. Professor Altug was specifically awarded the New Investigator grant.

The goal of the Matching Grant Program is to attract “top scientific talent, spurring new research opportunities, and increas[e] industry-sponsored research” in Massachusetts. The program’s New Investigator Solicitation aims to promote the novel research and career advancement of new investigators who are involved in the development of breakthrough life sciences research. Recipients of this honor recieve a grant of $100,000 per year for up to two years.

Professor Altug will be honored along with other MLSC Matching Grant awardees at a gathering hosted by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center at the Museum of Science on April 28, 2009.

The MLSC is a quasi-public agency of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts established to promote the life sciences.

In the College of Engineering 2009 Distinguished Lecture, Malvin Carl Teich, a BU professor of engineering and director of the University’s Quantum Photonics Laboratory, talks about fractals, unusual objects that possess a form of self-scaling whereby a part of the whole can be made to recreate the whole by shifting and stretching.

Examples of random fractals include the length of the coast of Iceland and the variation of water flow in the river Nile. Random phenomena whose individual events occur at discrete points are known as point processes. Examples in time include the arrival of cars at a tollbooth; examples in space include the locations of galaxies and the epicenters of earthquakes. Fractal-based point processes are endowed with both the scaling properties of fractals and the discrete character of random point processes. Teich talks mainly about three applications: optical instrumentations that make use of photon counting; the diagnosis of cardiovascular dysfunction from heart rate variability measures; and congestion control for computer network traffic.

Video length is 01:27:58.

About the speaker:
Malvin Carl Teich is a Boston University professor of electrical and computer engineering, with joint appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering and physics. He is director of the BU Quantum Physics Laboratory and a member of the University’s Photonics Center, Center for Adaptive Physics, Hearing Research Center, and program in neuroscience.

He is widely known for his studies of fractal stochastic processes and information transmission in biological systems. He is a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a fellow of the Optical Society of America. In 1973 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1992 he was honored with the Memorial Gold Medal of Palacky University of the Czech Republic.